Rent High-Rise (2015)

Nice scenery, shame about everything else. - High-Rise review by MW

As a fan of Wheatley's previous offerings, I was looking forward to this. Apart from the set design (which is superb), everything else feels a bit forced. I'm not sure why the Director chose to make this or what he was hoping to say. It doesn't work as a satire, drama or thriller. None of the characters are particularly likeable, they're mostly caricatures and I wasn't bothered what happened to any of them. It reminded me of one of those "Play for today" dramas the BBC used to make in the seventies. But much, much longer.

Don't Bother - High-Rise review by PE

Don't let the superb production design and cinematography lull you into thinking this film is worth watching, it isn't

rubbish - High-Rise review by CP Customer

Dont bother very disappointing, stupid movie........................................not worth any more.

I got bored and gave up. - High-Rise review by CC

This started well and looked fantastic but as time progressed I found myself more and more bored and distracted.

An hour in, I was finding it difficult to continue to care. I checked the run time and found I had another hour.

I gave it five more minutes.

I switched it off.

The problem is this - the depiction of the social order and its evident breakdown is far too repetitive and ought to have been cut drastically. I'm sure I missed some interesting drama at the end - but I just couldn't be bothered to wade through more stylish but hollow repetition.

Not for the first time I find myself thinking that Ben Wheatley makes half of a good film and half of a terrible one and cut and shuts them together.

Shame - I had high hopes for it - no pun intended.

Disappointing - High-Rise review by AL

I loved Wheatley's previous films, and expected better. I had read the source material, but don't think that this filme either reflects or enhances the book. I have watched this story of social disorder put forward in better films.

Cannes fodder - High-Rise review by JD

This film is very specifically aimed at the Cannes film festival film critics. It is soooh arty. Lots of disinterested sex, drowned dogs, camera man filming camera man filming camera man, the plot is poor (in essence the higher the floor you live on the posher you are, floors warring with floors). Not pretty, not brilliant, not entertaining. I didn't get to the end.

Anarchy in the UK - High-Rise review by Count Otto Black

In this unsubtle allegory, a mega-rich man whose surname is Royal (like I said, unsubtle!) builds a 40-story tower-block intended to function as microcosm of society, with everyone's social status indicated by how far up it they live, instals himself in a heavenly penthouse accessible only by a private elevator (so basically he's God), and assumes his innovative social experiment will work out just fine.

It doesn't. Beset by the very specific ills of Thatcher's Britain, in which the film is set - class inequality, power outages, and mounting piles of garbage - the tenants of the lower floors rebel, the upper classes strike back, and by the time equilibrium has been restored, the survivors are ragged savages living among the debris of civilization and eating roast dogs.

Almost nothing in the film is the slightest bit subtle. The basic premise, that all the occupants of the block spontaneously cut themselves off from the outside world (which somehow doesn't notice) in order to wage a symbolic class war, doesn't even pretend to be realistic. Every character is a symbol rather than a person, they often talk in oddly stilted ways, and none of them are particularly likable, though the poorest tenants are portrayed as the nicest, while the richest are monstrously decadent one-dimensional caricatures.

Ben Wheatley's films have consistently shown that, while he's a technically accomplished director willing to explore the blackest of black humor and the most grotesque of situations, his worst failing is that he doesn't know where to draw the line. Sometimes, especially in his debut feature "Down Terrace", the humor becomes so dark that it isn't funny at all, and the grimness is so relentless that it's downright depressing.

Here, given by far his biggest budget to date, he meticulously creates a complex environment with a great deal going on in it, but it's never as involving as it should be, because we simply don't care what happens to most of these horrible people. And once you lose interest in the characters, it soon dawns on you that the scenes of them doing unpleasant things frequently go on for much longer than necessary before the plot advances.

As for Tom Hiddleston's "hero", he's literally an Everyman, the ultimate social mixer who ironically becomes the only tenant to truly fit in while inadvertently triggering the Apocalypse, and he drifts passively through almost all the action, most of which is supplied by a secondary character, the unsubtly-named Wilder, who ought to be the official hero of the film. In a book, it's fine for the protagonist to wander around allowing us to see the action through his eyes but not really doing much himself. In a movie, that function is usually performed by something called a "camera".

It looks splendid, though often in an unpleasant way, but ultimately this film is hollow at its core, and casting the talented and charismatic Hiddleston isn't enough to hide the fact that he's playing a nonentity. Luis Buñuel's 1962 Surrealist masterpiece "The Exterminating Angel" explores a very similar situation on a vastly lower budget, but it's a far better film because Buñuel understood that even if you disapproved of the decadent upper-class characters (which Buñuel, being a member of the Communist Party, obviously did), to enjoy the movie you had to care whether or not they survived. Ben Wheatley needs to work on that.